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Democracy in Action: Entrepreneurship

February 4, 2013

Entrepreneurs are crucial to building free and fair democracies that deliver opportunity to all. Their economic success provides jobs, supports a competitive marketplace, and increases business participation in the democratic process through business associations and chambers of commerce. Yet, in many countries, institutional barriers prevent people from becoming entrepreneurs or render existing firms incapable of growing. To overcome it, supporting entrepreneurship must go beyond helping individuals and instead focus on building entrepreneur-friendly environments with legal structures necessary to establish and develop open market-oriented systems.

Building entrepreneurial economies requires a number of steps: building market institutions; removing barriers to starting, operating, and growing a business; reforming educational systems; and creating a broader awareness and understanding of what entrepreneurship means. As simple as the recipe for entrepreneurship-driven development may be, the implementation of necessary reforms is a much more complex matter. Institutional change takes time, effort, determination, and, above all, dedicated reformers. CIPE's experience around the world shows that entrepreneurs can become a driving force for reform, when they work together and make their voices heard through business associations and chambers of commerce. Find out more here.

Looking at the glittering corporate campuses of booming technology startups in places like Silicon Valley, Boston, or North Carolina’s Research Triangle, it is easy to see nothing but success. But one of the secrets of entrepreneurship is that all of these successes are built on a culture that embraces failure. It is a surprising truth borne out again and again by business researchers: the places where entrepreneurs have the most success are the ones where it is least painful for entrepreneurs to fail.Read the rest of this article.

When you think “entrepreneur” what image comes to mind? Celebrity IT entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, or Larry Page seem to be the automatic associations. Yet, focusing just on big names and one sector overlooks the vast majority of self-starters out there who successfully founded their own business. Their importance to the economy is crucial. Read the rest of this article.

Within the last five years, crowdsourcing has risen as new phenomena both in the business world and in international development. Coined by Jeff Howe in WIRED magazine, the term crowdsourcing traditionally refers to using free or low-cost information or labor from a “crowd” to accomplish a task. The innovative potential of this tool is impressive. Around the world crowdsourcing technologies have facilitated new ways to connect services with clients, track protests, fund businesses, map disasters, and more.Read the rest of this article.